Albireo Energy Recovers from Ransomware in 3 Days and Reduces Costs by 50% with Druva

Albireo Energy optimizes building performance with smart building solutions for clients around the world. Its strategies and services enhance efficiency and reduce operational costs while improving occupant comfort and building value.

Albireo Energy manages a hybrid IT environment across 25 locations. Its production environment operates mainly in the cloud and includes business-critical applications like Splunk, Tenable, and SQL. And, while its cloud workloads are managed and backed up through a managed service provider (MSP), its on-premises workloads were either backed by Veeam or not at all. In the United States, its on-premises infrastructure contains file services, NAS, applications, and databases running across physical and virtual infrastructure (VMware and Microsoft).

A challenge Dahlin and team faced was that he would have to transport external drives containing backups to his house each night. Additionally, the infrastructure team was tasked with moving all employees to remote work. As Dahlin recalled, “I reached out to our partner, CDW, and asked how we could start backing up our on-premises data in the cloud because, at the time, Veeam didn’t offer a cloud-based backup solution.”

“CDW introduced us to several vendors, including Druva. The other vendors didn’t impress me, so we engaged with Druva and initiated a POC,” said Dahlin.

After a successful POC, Albireo Energy deployed Druva for every on-premises Microsoft Windows server (file, print, and applications) and VMs.

The Druva Data Resiliency Cloud is the only at-scale SaaS platform designed for a hybrid, multi-cloud world. Through a single, unified console they can easily manage all their data resiliency services across physical and virtual on-premises workloads, cloud-native and SaaS applications, and critical IT endpoints. Not only was Veeam unable to deliver cloud-based data protection, but it was more expensive than Druva. The fact that the Druva solution is completely SaaS-based, flexible, and simple to deploy was very attractive to Dahlin and team.

A notable comment from Dahlin was how easy Druva was to deploy. “I have never used a system that was this simple and easy to set up, we can scale up or down with a couple clicks of a mouse and that’s exactly what I was looking for.” he said.

Having air-gapped backups with Druva was an important and differentiating capability for Dahlin and team. Not long after it deployed the Druva solution, Albireo Energy was hit by the Conti ransomware attack.

“Because of Druva, we were able to recover quickly and confidently. We had about 80% of our hybrid workload servers up and running within 1 business day of being hit by Conti ransomware,” said Dahlin.

The events presented on a Thursday night. By Friday morning, Dahlin and the company knew the ransomware had gotten in via email. Dahlin first instructed the MSP to shut down its cloud environment and restore from a certain date and time. He and his team then began to restore its on-premises Druva environment.

“Thanks to Druva, our on-premises servers were back up and running by the following Monday morning,” Dahlin said. “We had a couple of backup sets that presented some challenges, but nothing that a call with Druva support couldn’t quickly resolve. Everything else was restored without a problem,” he added.

Other benefits that Dahlin and team have achieved by leveraging Druva include a reduction in overhead and stress associated with backup. “With Druva, I have greatly reduced my personal workload, and I sleep better at night given I’m no longer worried about my on-premises backups.”

In addition, Dahlin noted that he’s saving days and weeks of time every month with Druva. “With Veeam, I spent hours per day several days per week, going through backups and changing out backup sets,” said Dahlin. And, he had to take 10 five TB external hard drives home each night. That task has been eliminated thanks to Druva. “Before Druva, I had to change hard drives frequently. Now I don’t have to do that. Not only would I say I’m 95% more efficient now that we have Druva deployed, and I believe we have reduced our TCO by at least 50%,” Dahlin said.

By replacing Veeam, Albireo Energy has been able to eliminate costs and complexity from onsite hardware, software maintenance, and administrative overhead. Additionally, it has improved storage efficiency with 2.2x global deduplication across all on-premises source data.